YOUR COVER LETTER

By Karen Conole

You’ve worked hard to get your resume to reflect your abilities, so don’t let your cover letter depict you as just another anonymous applicant. Make the person who reads your letter want to know more about you personally. Here are a few pointers to follow:

1. Whenever possible, address your cover letter to the person who could hire you, using that person’s name and title. Do some research to find out the name of the hiring manager. If you can’t get the name, at least use the title (“Dear Hiring Manager” or “Dear Selection Committee”), but don’t use “To whom it may concern” or “Dear Sir or Madam,” both of which are impersonal and overused.

2. Do a little advance research on the firm. Wouldn’t you want to know something about a place where you may be working? Try to find out something you can add to the cover letter to show that you know about the firm’s current focus, interests, challenges, etc.

3. Express your enthusiasm for the work and in the company, in particular. Every employer wants to hire people who genuinely want to work for them, so express that desire if you feel it (and if you don’t, why apply for that position at all?).

4. Run a spell check and grammar check before printing any letter to any employer. It only takes a moment, and you may be surprised at how many errors you catch. Many employers say that even one mistake is enough to give them concern about a candidate’s attention to detail. They may wonder, “What if that had been a letter sent out to one of our clients?” and move on to the next resume.

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